As we reach the end of the year it’s hard not to reflect on how disrupted the world has felt over the last 12 months. 2 horrific ongoing wars, climate events, major elections in a number of countries, and the continuing pace of technological change feeling slightly dizzying. Sometimes it feels like burying your head in a book and escaping from it all for a few hours is the only sane thing to do. I’m not sure it’s really the answer, but it does help.
On a more selfish/positive/personal note, 2024 has been a year when the channel has continued to grow healthily, so thank you all for the part you have played in that. As I reflected in a recent video, I’m not sure much will change in 2025, but there are a few new things I’d like to try.
I hope that the year has been a good one for all of you. That you’re ending it in a comfortable place, with some good reads under your belt and a healthy TBR for the year ahead.
Cheerio! (and Happy New Year!)
Books I’ve Read This Week
Her Diaries & Notebooks by Patricia Highsmith
Reading this book was a fascinating, moving experience. I don’t read many memoirs, and when I do they’re the considered, filtered kind. Reading something as raw as this was breathtaking – Highsmith’s most private thoughts laid bare. It feels intrusive at times, but it’s also utterly compelling, even when she’s describing the most mundane things.
She’s an author I’ve come to greatly admire over the last 2 years, so having access to her diaries and notebooks felt like a rare treat, an opportunity to better understand a truly great writer.
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
How to describe ’The Thorn Birds’? It’s hugely long (around 700 pages) has an uncomfortable premise (the relationship between a Catholic priest and a woman – they first meet when she is 10 and he is 26) and it was massively successful. The book is the most successful Australian book ever and the TV mini series was the second most successful of all time when it first aired. Oh, and it’s fine. The premise is less horrific than it might have been, the length is just about justified by the multi-decade, generational family saga style of the story and it’s readable enough. The book came out at the time that the rest of the world was remembering Australia existed, and the setting helps – there’s an authenticity to it all that makes even the minutiae quite interesting. There are some decent set pieces too, including a storm sequence which is wonderfully dramatic.
The characters are okay, not exactly fascinating, but interesting enough that I did enjoy following their lives. The lack of a real plot is probably the book’s biggest weakness. It’s one of those blockbusters that’s more a series of things happening than an actual story. Sometimes that works but I’m not sure it did here.
In summary, it was 700 pages and I finished it, so I guess it was okay?
Victims by Jack Pearl
It’s Christmas Eve in New York in the early 70s and a group of black militants is planting bombs to further their cause. When one of the bombs is lost an officer from the bomb squad and leader of the militant group go on a race against time to find it. This could have been amazing, but it fumbles the ball a couple of times and ends up simply being a very enjoyable curio. The Christmas setting is well done, the politics is reasonably even-handed (be prepared to encounter every racial slur you can think to though) and there’s even a redemption sub-plot for a minor character. I never say this, but it admit felt like it should have been longer. The final act is very rushed and could have had even more tension wring out of it.
I love trash books like this that capture the mood of a moment, and ‘Victims’ certainly does that, for better or worse.
Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett
‘Eye of the Needle’ is an early novel from Ken Follett, now best known for his doorstep historical sagas. The book was first published in 1978, by which point Follett had already published a bunch of crime novels and trashy tie ins. It was his first big hit and was filmed 3 years later with Donald Sutherland in the lead role.
It’s not hard to see why it was so successful. It’s a gripping, convincing thriller set in WW2 Britain, and follows a German spy who has discovered the truth of the D-Day preparations. Pitched against him are the authorities (both MI5 and the police) and some civilians who get caught up in events.
What impresses most about it is the character work and the sense of place. It really does feel like an accurate portrayal of life in wartime Britain, and the cast (including trhe spy himself) are convincingly and sympathetically drawn. You know he has to be stopped, you want him to be stopped, and yet you also feel the tension of his double life.
It’s all great, page-turning stuff, and very enjoyable.
CriminOlly 
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